When pizza places began offering cheese-stuffed pizza crust my first thought was not, “What will they think of to put inside a pizza crust next?”

This time, however, not only was it my first thought, but I’m almost certain the ideas that I came up with will soon be available: fried chicken finger stuffed crust, barbecued pork stuffed crust, and, naturally, Oreo stuffed crust.

You can thank Iowans for the stuffed crust. I was working at a central Iowa Slut when it was tested in America’s test market. It didn’t matter how many we made each morning, they would sell out. It went national, at most, 6 months later.

Once upon a time in Mexico, and this still might be true with a few unfortunate, clueless pizzerias, when you ordered your pie with sausage, it would be a goddamned sliced hot dog wiener.

My theory is that these people would “copy” the Pizza Hut or Domino’s menu, without bothering to order and test the items within, and due to a little Spanish blind spot, would assume that “sausage” and “wiener” were one and the same.

Don’t missed the Guardian’s taste test: “The bread was fake and weird but chewy like a bagel. I soon neared the end of my slice and its bedoughed, pink-brown phallus. I took a tentative bite.It was a hot dog sausage. It was rubbery and processed and salty and smoky. How, in its own filthy way, could it be anything other than …”

I worked at a Pizza Hut in high school and college so I can say the writer of this article obviously didn’t pay much attention when he did the same.
The ‘developer’ he talks about spraying on the dough is just canned oil, something you’d put on any dough you that’s going to rise in a container with a lid on it.

Not that I’m well removed from the equation, I can eat Pizza Hut again and actually find it to be a treat I rarely see here in Chicago with so many other options available. I like it the same way I like Taco Bell or cheap chinese food; not as a replacement for something more authentic, but as a entirely separate experience.

Those things go together, though – breakfast flavors (pancakes, maple syrup, bacon – a tasty breakfast). I’ve had one too. We saw them at the donut shop (a small place with some of the best donuts I’ve ever had, run by a SE Asian family in Huntington Beach) and got it sort of as a joke – like a “we have to try it” kind of thing – and it was really great. Not sure I’d eat one more than once every couple of years though.

Yeah, as much as I liked the bacon doughnut, I don’t see a need to eat another one for a good long time. I was disturbed at how much I liked the caramelized bacon.

I’d like to make a pizza that is nothing but a series of concentric stuffed crusts, starting with a very pizza-like one in the center, i.e. sausage, mushrooms and cheese, and eventually ending with something very dessert-like stuffed in the crust at the edge, like Nutella or baklava.

Not a ‘deep fantasy’ dream, but a realistic ‘everything is surreal’ dream; the kind where I’m naked in my 1st grade class, everyone’s teeth fell out, and the flowers in the carpet have my ex’s screaming face in them.

An blog post I read recently pointed out that Pizza Hut’s Twitter feed is almost excusively people complaining about the low quality of their products and service. I inagine the Pizza Hut execs saying, “Hot dog stuffed crust pizza! That will turn things around for us!”